When There Are No Adults in the Room
Trump loves to drive his opponents mad. We don't have to give him what he wants.
The things I dread about a second presidency of Donald Trump are almost too numerous to mention. Here are a few off the top of my head.
Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to quell protests and never lifts it, while Republican majorities in Congress never express a syllable of opposition, leading to de facto imposition of martial law in several American cities.
Trump imposes Schedule F reform on the executive branch, converting tens of thousands of career civil servants to at-will employment and summarily firing and replacing them with lackeys pre-vetted for their fealty to Trump rather than bureaucratic expertise, experience, or competence.
Trump orders the rounding up of millions of undocumented immigrants, a process involving ICE raids in communities across the country and the building of vast internment camps for housing the deportees while they are being processed for expulsion.
Trump and Congress enact a series of measures—tax cuts on wealthy individuals and corporations, the imposition of tariffs, a wild federal spending spree—that both sends the debt skyrocketing beyond its already record-high peacetime levels and produces a return of inflation. This would likely be followed by a surge in interest rates that could inspire Trump to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve and seek to replace him with a loyalist ready and willing to do the president’s bidding.
Any number of international crises unfold, with one or more of them going sideways amidst mixed signals coming from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the president’s social media posts, plunging the country into war with at least one major power.
Those are just the items near the top of a lengthy list of my worries—all of them things Trump does.
But there’s something else I dread about the prospect of a Trump restoration: My own side discrediting itself (again).
What “Both Sides” Means to Me
I know, I sound like a caricature of a “both sides” centrist pundit: You mean a wannabe Caesar is running neck-and-neck with a normie incumbent president, and if the dictator-in-waiting wins the election I’ll be as worried about those who resist his rule as I am about him? How pathetic!
But that’s (obviously) not how I see it.
For one thing, I’m not equally worried about the two sides. Trump would be the primary cause of all the terrible possibilities I listed above. Everything I write here follows from the premise that the populist right is more dangerous than the left. This enrages some of my right-leaning subscribers, who feel driven to support Trump as a last-ditch effort to thwart the insidious and morally appalling advance of the left.
That’s not how I see it. I dislike some of what the left is doing or trying to do at any given time, and I intensely dislike some of what it’s doing and trying to do right now. But the left in this country has weaker support in public opinion than the right. The Democratic Party is a very broad coalition, ranging from Bernie Sanders and “The Squad” on the left to Michael Bloomberg in the center. The GOP, by contrast, is about 75-80 percent in Trump’s pocket, and it’s capable of winning nationwide elections by convincing independent voters to give it support, if only to prevent the left from wielding more power than it currently does.
You don’t have to agree with this analysis. My point is simply that I’m not engaging in “both sides” equivocation.
The right is worse.
But that doesn’t mean the right’s electoral successes take place in a vacuum. The right benefits when the left looks irresponsible, untrustworthy, and unhinged.
There was an awful lot of that during the Trump administration.
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